Solano County police, fire do their best to train for the worst

That nightmare became something of a reality Thursday evening as a barrage of gunfire erupted at the otherwise quiet campus of Vacaville's Sierra Vista Elementary School.

Fortunately, the hailstorm of gunshots and booming explosion that followed moments later were part of a planned countywide exercise geared toward preparing Solano's first responders for the worst - a mass casualty incident with multiple victims requiring immediate treatment and an unknown number of suspects.

According to Vacaville police Lt. John Carli, the first few minutes of the exercise, which began at 5 and continued through 10 p.m., dealt with the active shooter portion of the scenario.

"From there on out, it's going to be how police and fire deal with a mass casualty situation," he explained.

A team of nearly 200 first responders from the Vacaville police and fire departments combined with Travis Air Force Base and the Solano County Office of Emergency Services, including the department's Mobile Command Unit, along with fire personnel from Fairfield, Dixon, Suisun and Cordelia took part in the exercise.

Following the initial burst of gunshots - don't worry, they were blanks - a team of responding officers advanced on the "suspect," who was taken into custody just outside one of the school's portable buildings. However, not before a flashbang, simulating a bomb planted by a second "suspect" was detonated. Officers worked quickly to clear the remainder of the school, just in case there were others involved who posed a threat.

That's when the chaos of the scenario was ratcheted up to a new level.

Each classroom cleared seemed to reveal victim after victim - enthusiastically portrayed by 33 civil air patrol cadets from Squadron 22 at TAFB and Squadron 14 in Sacramento.

As darkness set in, the cries for help grew louder and louder. After the campus had been secured, arriving fire personnel were tasked with locating, counting, evaluating and providing emergency treatment to each victim before the were shuttled to nearby hospitals where the training continued for medical staff.

Once the moulage-covered "victims" were cleared away, the training took yet another turn as the County's HazMat team was called in to deal with a "white powdery substance" that was discovered in a classroom that served as another component of the attack.

"We deal with calls all the time where a person might be inside a house, doesn't want to come out, might have a gun, might be armed and we contain it. We contain a home and set up perimeters, but in this particular case, there is no containment here. This is trying to identify a moving threat," Carli said.

Most importantly, the training, which was funded through a federal grant obtained by Solano OES, is testing to each agency involved, Carli said.

"It's even testing the fact that the Red Cross is here and being able to set up, what that would look like and all of the secondary support services that take place. You think about the details and it's absolute overwhelming to some communities who don't have the resources. A small agency might not have the same access to resources and still might have to deal with the same amount of impact," he said, referring to incidents such as the Newtown, Conn. shooting that plunged the city into the national forefront of media attention.

"Typically the lessons learned come from the debrief later on," added Ralph Brown with the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo, who is planning a similar exercise in Vallejo.

Don Ryan, emergency services manager for Solano County, also called the training a huge success.

"I'm extremely happy with how all of this went down," Ryan said. "It's gone very well ... even with the parking the way it is and it being hard to move around, that's reality for you, that's real world."